The family of 22-year-old Donna Ursula Waugh, 22, had reported her missing after she didn’t show up for a family gathering on July 19, 1980, nine days earlier.

The last person to see Waugh alive had been her boss at the Bullfighter Restaurant, 2595 S. Colorado Blvd., at 2 a.m. on July 18. He had walked Waugh, a bartender, to her car.

When investigators checked Waugh’s home address, something jumped out at them.

She lived at 3535 S. Pearl St. in Denver, across the alley from Tolerton’s apartment. They were neighbors. Waugh’s car was found in the parking lot of a grocery store only 2 1/2 blocks from her house. There were no signs of a struggle in her apartment, where authorities found her purse. Authorities concluded she was lured from her apartment after returning home and changing clothes.

Other facts would be just as telling. When they looked into Tolerton’s background, they discovered that he had been convicted of kidnapping a woman at gunpoint from a parking lot and sexually assaulting her in Ohio in 1976. He was given a probation sentence for that crime.

Waugh’s body had been found only a few miles from where Pruszynski’s body had been found six months earlier.

Authorities began looking at Tolerton not only as Waugh’s killer but also of Pruszynski’s as well. The investigation would soon encompass the unsolved murders of several other young women.

The murders of both Waugh and Pruszynski were believed to have been committed by a stranger. In both instances the women had been sexually assaulted and dumped in fields.

Tolerton pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Three years later, another Englewood woman disappeared. Pamela Lynne Neal, a Key Savings and Loan teller, walked to a nearby Safeway grocery store to buy a deli lunch on March 31, 1983. She then walked to her apartment, but never returned to work.

Authorities were so convinced that there could be a tie to the Pruszynski murder that they conducted ground and air searches over the same field where the radio intern’s body had been found.

“Both women were very attractive, petite, pretty, about the same age and short,” former Englewood Sgt. George Egri told a Rocky Mountain News reporter in 1983. “And both were apparently kidnapped in or near their homes by someone who knew their daily routines.”

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.